/dev/chat

@Fabby yep!

11:07 PM

I hibernate though so RAM+SQRT(RAM)

No one should hibernate a SAP HANA machine...

@Fabby do not feel like firing up the corporate VPN in my Mac

@Fabby yep

It's just a waste of CPU/DSK/SAN/...

@Fabby And money!

I remember a customer asking for that...

We did some tests and rebooting gave better response faster.

(We still had to lab test and prove it to the customer though)

@Fabby lol

11:10 PM

here is another dumb thing a customer asked:

@Fabby If I had a cent for dumber stuff...

Q: Is there a way of limiting the Kernel's memory manager to use only 75% of memory?

2

OK, here the premise: Customer is a Windows shop and their Ubuntu VMs always use 100% of their allocated memory (as per design) so they show up in "Red" on the memory usage charts. As we don't have access inside the VMs, the memory usage is measured externally by VMWare and Googling didn't give m...

@Fabby LOL

Note:

the memory usage is measured externally by VMWare and Googling didn't give me any more insight as what I want to do is stupid.

@Fabby Or turn off the memory maybe . LOL

11:12 PM

@RuiFRibeiro That's what we ended up doing.

@Fabby idiotic indeed.

@RuiFRibeiro he customer is happy though...

all green on all Linux machines always

@Fabby lol

We're getting more RHEL machines to deploy and they still pay for 100% of the memory...

/shrug...

@Fabby The most stupid story I have....is a customer opening tickets on lieu of a supplier they had

11:15 PM

One of these days when they come back: How can we save money? I'm going to tell them:

By allowing all of the Linux machines to go into the yellow.

@Fabby a 3rd party....which basicallly was asking us how to use MySQL....

:D :D :D

:)

@Fabby the fault at the end of the day was of the PM. I ended up involving my superior to put some sense on the PM...no more tickets allowed to explain how to use MySQL

lol

@RuiFRibeiro Yeah...

PMs who don't know shit...

I have tons of those as colleagues.

(You know I'm a TPM, don't you?)

@Fabby the one opening the ticket was the customer, and the ones asking for the tickets were a 3rd party supplier unrelated to us

11:18 PM

@RuiFRibeiro Great!

I need another drink!

BRB

@Fabby yeah, I know.... anyway, it just made the situation more laughable.

@Fabby And despite explaining it did not make sense several times to the PM on several tickets, she still said: "Please help them one more time" each time it happened.

lol

@Fabby The supplier in question is a very well known in PT, and supposedly a well established firm....

@Jesse_b So, a blindingly obvious application of cron as it is supposed to be used?

@FaheemMitha Doing a shutdown every 10 minutes ;)

@Jesse_b Not that mindless. They both requires some attention. As does cooking to some extent, I suppose. Personally, I'd avoid being distracted while driving, at least. Though I do know that people play audio books while driving. I guess it depends where you are.

@RuiFRibeiro Ah, so football is an example of "bread and circuses"? I'd certainly agree with that. Did you read what Chomsky said about sports?

@RuiFRibeiro That's what I always do too: make people laugh...

11:27 PM

@FaheemMitha Let´s not forget the one of the first mortal incidents (the first?) with a Tesla, the guy was seeing Harry potter....

People are volunteering to work with me...

Well, I'll tell you. He said, when he was a child he realised - why am I cheering for this team? I don't know any of them! It makes no difference to me whether they win!

@FaheemMitha Not familiar with Chomsky work...

... whereas other PMs have a hard time finding resources...

@RuiFRibeiro Huh? Seeing Harry Potter?

11:28 PM

@FaheemMitha Watching

@FaheemMitha For me it makes no difference when they win, when they marry or when they die. Football or hollywood people....

Seeing and watching is one word in Portuguese.

@Fabby Watching a movie in his car?

@FaheemMitha yeah

@FaheemMitha The first Tesla crash??? Yes!

11:29 PM

@RuiFRibeiro It makes no difference to anybody except the people concerned.

@RuiFRibeiro That's nuts.

@FaheemMitha He was American. QED.

@FaheemMitha theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/01/…

:D

@Fabby LOL

Hey guys - anyone use BorgBackup?

11:30 PM

@m4p85r I do.

The Tesla driver killed in the first known fatal crash involving a self-driving car may have been watching a Harry Potter movie at the time of the collision in Florida, according to a truck driver involved in the crash.

@Fabby

@m4p85r Do you have a link to your question on the site?

>:-)

@m4p85r Me too. But a slightly out of date version.

Really should upgrade.

Nah it's not big enough for a question. It's just about borg check

11:31 PM

Real men do not do backups, they live on the edge.

It works fine with simple 'borg check <remote:repo>'

@m4p85r What is the question?

@RuiFRibeiro Not really, no.

but how can it be sure there are no bad sectors if it doesn't compare to my local files?

fab-user@fab-ux-predator:~/Documents/Doom
$ borg --version
borg 1.1.8

@FaheemMitha humour....context ;)

11:32 PM

root@orwell:/home/faheem# borg --version
borg 1.0.9

@RuiFRibeiro One should not say such things, even in jest.

especially for the --verify-data
Surely it would have to be something like
borg check --verify-data <remote:repo> /path/to/local/files

so that it could compare them?

@FaheemMitha I am an old fart that does not mind about saying or not saying things in jest.... ;-P

@RuiFRibeiro Starred!

@m4p85r I'm unclear what your concern is. If your data is corrupted, checking your backup against the original is not going to help, surely?

@m4p85r Do you know what a hash is?

11:34 PM

@Fabby ;-P

@Fabby @Faheem

@RuiFRibeiro It's funny (CC @FaheemMitha)

@Fabby Yep I know what a hash is

I am really tired of the Unix group being corrupted into a data recovery service....needing vacations!

All a backup can do, at best, is faithfully copy the original. It can't guarantee the original is not rubbish.

11:35 PM

@FaheemMitha I know my local data is fine, I want to check that there's no bit-rot on the server-side + that it transferred across correctly.

@m4p85r so? it checks the hash of the file, not the bad sectors. That's what fsck is for

@m4p85r Ah, ok. Then yes, you can do a check across both.

@Fabby fsck does not revive bad sectors....

@RuiFRibeiro I never pretended it did.

@Fabby yes sorry I'm not doing any sort of data recovery. It's more how am I sure the backup is a 'good' one that actually contains all my files etc.
Particularly with their versioning, if one of those chunks goes bad it won't be backed-up again unless I happen to change the local file.

11:36 PM

@m4p85r You could also do a periodic borg extract on your backups to make sure extract actually works.

@Fabby ;) fsck only checks the integrity of the (meta)data.

@FaheemMitha will extract fail if there is corruption? I would still need to manually compare each file to my local files using a checksum or something though.

@Fabby I do not know why so many people coming here expecting Unix miracles. We are not (Unix) necromancers. We cannot recall data from dead media.

@m4p85r You want to back up bad blocks?

That's not the point of a backup.

a backup is made to restore...

@RuiFRibeiro Hey, I am!!!

:D

@RuiFRibeiro fsck can call badblocks.

@Fabby haha no. I just want to essentially perform a data integrity check of the backup compared to local files. I.e. is there an automated tool in borg that will compare a checksum of my local files to the latest backup

11:39 PM

@m4p85r --verify-data is experimental.

@m4p85r I'm unclear whether borg check compares original and backup. That's your basic question, right?

@Fabby ;) fsck can use alternative inodes pointers, which are in several places....

I know it checks a bunch of stuff.

@m4p85r BTW, a better way to ask about stuff is the Borg project itself.

@m4p85r What "experimental" means is:

@Fabby Something similar, cant recall the exact details.

11:40 PM

IRC in the first instance.

@FaheemMitha essentially yes. I'm unsure what it actually does though as it doesn't take the path to the local files as an argument. If it doesn't know what it's cehcking against - what is it actually doing??

"We've written the logic and are not aware that it doesn't work"

@Fabby ;-P

@Fabby sounds like most of my code :P

@m4p85r BorgBackup doesn't work that way.

11:41 PM

@m4p85r You mean the borg check command?

@FaheemMitha yes

@m4p85r It does block-level deduplicating compressing backup.

@Fabby one sided convos are so strange.... LOL

@Fabby what have I got wrong?

so as long as the block's hash hasn't changed, it doesn't back it up.

11:42 PM

@m4p85r These concerns are really best bought up with the developers. They can give me definitive answers, hopefully.

so as long as the block is readable it's backed up.

Thomas is on IRC, and he occasionally answers questions. I think there is probably also a mailing list, though I can't remember if I have ever used it.

You should contact the authors of the software. @m4p85r

A question on the site would also be reasonable, IMO.

@FaheemMitha I agree CC @m4p85r

11:43 PM

I'd first try on IRC. Or you could post a SE question, and then point people on IRC to it. That way, you won't have to try to explain yourself on IRC.

This is not a one-line answer.

@Fabby @FaheemMitha cheers for the info. I wasn't sure if I was just missing something blindingly obvious (like usual...)

I'll chuck a question up

Developers have been known to answer on IRC, too. Not that often, though. Many free software developers don't approve of SE.

Because it's closed source?

Speaking of backups, I was chatting earlier with @Jesse_b about getting a more 'professional" backup setup.

11:44 PM

This chat is about as close as I've ever gotten to 'real' IRC though. How would I find out which channel a developer of borg?

@m4p85r Yes, it's a proprietary platform controlled by a company.

*.. is on

I was initially talking about NAS, but Jesse thought that using a regular computer made more sense.

@m4p85r Do a search for "borg backup irc". Borg has its own channel on freenode.

@FaheemMitha github.com/borgbackup

#borgbackup, to be precise.

@Fabby I think you're linking to the wrong comment.

11:47 PM

ahaaaa
There's the usual "missing the blindingly obvious" stuff that I'm used to. Haha sorry for being clueless. Thanks for the help!

@FaheemMitha Which Application were you talking about then?

@Fabby I'm not sure what you mean. I just pointed out that your borg link comment references my comment about Stack Exchange.

@FaheemMitha Aaah!!!!

I thought you were talking about BorgBackup being closed source!

:D :D :D

@m4p85r borgbackup.org/support/free.html

Anyway, so I was actually thinking the following. I only have one proper computer here. If the mb (for example) fell over and died tomorrow, that would not be so great. So I was thinking of planning a second computer which I could (a) use for backup and (b) use as a fallback workstation if my current machine died.

Because getting it back up and running would probably not be trivial.

Actually, the computer people who were helping me earlier are no longer replying to my calls, and I haven't found a good substitute...

The only other computer I have here is a 12 year old laptop, which is better than nothing. But not exactly ideal.

And I'm pretty much alone here. Not exactly a network of people I can turn to for help.

Thoughts?

apple roses @RuiFRibeiro

Open tart, not pie!

11:56 PM

@Fabby Maybe another day...have not made that pie for 7 years, want to make it again. ;9